This was last night’s stunning success: Cream of Celery Soup with Crispy Veggie Flat Breads. I can even tell you briefly how I did it, though the process itself was anything but brief. I started working on dinner at 5 pm, and we didn’t eat until after 8 pm. It was so worth all the effort!

I started with two large bunches of very leafy organic celery. After picking off bad leaves, cutting off ugly bits and washing it all, I minced it finely in my food processor with a few cloves of garlic, half a small, mild onion, and the broccoli stems left over from a previous dinner. It was about five or six cups of minced veggies. All this went into my stock pot with two cups water and two cups organic, free-range chicken broth, brought to a boil and then left to simmer for about an hour and a half until everything was soft. I had to add some more water half-way through to keep it from boiling dry.

In a large skillet, I then sautéed some sliced mushrooms (about a quarter pound) in butter and set them aside.

Next up was two tablespoons of butter in the skillet until lightly browned, to which I added about three tablespoons of flour to create a roux. To this I added two cups of milk and simmered it gently until it was thick and bubbling. This mixture and the mushrooms were then added to the celery in the stock pot along with a cup of heavy cream and brought back to a low simmer. Once everything had heated through, I took half the pot’s ingredients and put it in the food processor to liquidize it completely. I added a bit more flour at this stage, because it wasn’t as thick as I wanted.

The now creamy mixture was returned to the pot and simmered for about 15-20 minutes, stirring constantly to keep the milk and cream from scalding or burning. At this point, I added some salt and pepper, but left it fairly bland since Lin and I differ on how much of each we like in our food.

I served it up with a large dollop of sour cream, a bit of grated jalapeño cheddar-jack cheese and some chopped green onions with the veggie flat breads on the side. The flat breads are a post for another day. I have been working on them since last week, and while they are awesome, I couldn’t actually tell you how to make them yet beyond mixing flour, water, a little salt and sugar and a bit of yeast. Still working out the details for utter perfection (they are really close to perfect).

Wow. Just looking at the photo and writing about it is making me hungry. I think I’ll go heat me up a bowl of that soup! Yeah, it makes a lot … enough to feed two people for several meals, and it’s very hearty and filling (and could totally be made vegetarian if you wanted to do so).

Behind the cut, a bunch more food photos and foodie babble from my week away from the internet.

This was dinner the night before last. Yes, we have been eating rather richly while my iMac was away. Well, I had to do something to keep myself busy! I broke down last week and bought some filet mignon at the grocery store, because we have not had a real steak since we started eating organic and local. Not that the farmers we get our meat from don’t have great steaks. They do, but they cost $10 a pound, and if I am going to pay that much, I want someone else to cook it for me.

Anyway, it’s skillet grilled filet mignon, a garden salad (naturally), broccoli steamed with lemon juice and smothered in butter-sautéed mushrooms and quasi-fake crab, and sweet potato oven fries. Oh so very, very yummy and cardiac arrest inducing!

The most surprising thing about this meal was the sweet potato fries. Quite frankly, I hate sweet potatoes. Actually, it isn’t that I hate them, but whenever I have eaten them in the past, I only get one bite in my mouth before I get queasy. It has been this way since childhood, no matter where I encountered them. To say the least, I was not expecting to either like or be able to eat these fries, but I know Lin loves sweet potatoes and he only gets them once a year at my family’s Xmas party. When we saw one of the farmers we usually buy veggies from had sweet potatoes last Saturday, I decided to get some and make them even if I couldn’t enjoy them at all. No reason he has to live without because I have issues with them.

After tentatively taking a small bite of a fry, imagine my surprise when I didn’t get queasy and even better LOVED them! Lin asked if I had added any sugar to them or any other spices while baking them, because they were so sweet. I hadn’t added anything other than a few tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper. They were really sweet and tasty! They did get a little too soft, so next time I make them, I’m going to take them out of the oven sooner than I did. Didn’t matter though, we gobbled them all up and wanted more … of everything we’d just eaten. It was all just that good … not to brag or anything.

My first crispy crust pizza! It turned out so perfectly, we’ll probably be having thin-crust pizza more often than any other sort, and it cuts my pizza making time down to 45 minutes … baking time included. Yippee! The ingredients on this one is leftover lime-cilantro chicken from the previous night’s dinner, black olives, onion, quartered artichoke hearts, and a variety of white cheeses (and roasted garlic tomato sauce — gotta have tomato sauce). I’ll be posting how to make the crust once I have worked it out perfectly. It’s the same recipe I used for the flat breads last night. It’s a very versatile bread.

Those would be my first attempt at pretzels. They certainly tasted like pretzels, but as you can see, they didn’t much look like pretzels. I blame this on two things: I had a minor brain fart while putting in the yeast and ended up having to guess how much I had already put in and the only flour I had in the house was the high-protein/high-gluten stuff I use to make bread (and it just really wants to pull together and puff up). I have since bought some regular flour, so I will be making pretzels again. Like I said, they may not have looked right, but that didn’t stop us from pouring on some mustard and pigging out on them all the same.

Let’s finish this post up with some photos of the haul we brought home from the farmer’s market last Saturday … and a nosy cat, of course.

All so very tasty, and we really didn’t spend all that much … at least no more than we would have buying non-local, non-organic stuff at the corner grocery store. It’s always so exciting for me to come home with a huge canvas bag stuffed full of fresh food goodness. It really inspires me to do my best to make it into tasty meals.

So there you have it, pretty much the entire week in food. We ate well this week, and I still have a ton of produce and meats in the kitchen for next week, though I think we are going to go check out the other Saturday farmer’s market since we have to drive by it to get cat food this weekend. Who knows what goodies we will find there. I can’t wait!

Tonight though, I do believe I am going to whine about wanting some fast food junk, like maybe burgers and fries from Sonic. I know it won’t taste nearly as good as I would like it to taste, but methinks the chef deserves a night off from the kitchen to spend more time with her newly returned computer. But now I need to go make cookies and bread, and since I have about a cup of heavy cream left over from the soup, I do believe I will try my hand at making butter today as well. Or not, I’m starting to feel lazy, and I’d really like to sit at the computer and goof off a little more.